[Discussion] book review: McGowan, _Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics_

[sule tarakcioglu]

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Amstdy@h-net.msu.edu (April 2004)

John McGowan. _Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of
Cultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. 272 pp.
Index. $17.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8014-8766-8.

Reviewed for H-Amstdy by Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Colorado
at Boulder

Democracy, the Classroom, and Literary Interpretation: Some Necessary
Clarifications

There is much tectonic shifting taking place in the humanities today.
Goods that once sold well seem to have a shorter shelf life; they are
either being discarded altogether or they are being salvaged for scraps
in the remainder bin.  The high-priests of yesteryear's so-called "pomo"
  theory--aporia, slippage, diffrence, textual intervention and
resistance--have flipped their cards and shown a losing hand.  The
conference on theory held at the University of Chicago on April 11,
2003, says it all.  _New York Times_ reporter, Emily Eakin, began her
piece:  "These are uncertain times for literary scholars.  The era of
big theory is over.  The grand paradigms that swept through humanities
departments in the twentieth century--psychoanalysis, structuralism,
Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism--have lost favor or been
abandoned. Money is tight.  And the leftist politics with which literary
theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating."[1]
That the question of theory's role in and outside humanities departments
today did not get much air-time suggests that theorizing the slippage of
signifier and signified has done little to make good on its promise:  to
resist, intervene, and transform a world increasingly marked by barbaric
acts. Theorizing has done little to curtail the rapid rise of
unemployment and homelessness, incarcerations without due process, the
collapse of public schooling systems, and genocidal warfare worldwide.
Perhaps, it is time to take pause and really reflect on the role of
theory, the teaching of literary interpretation, and the role of
literature in the world more generally.

Literary scholars and critics today are reflecting more and more on the
role of theory in and out of the classroom.  Such scholars are skeptical
of pomo's confusion of those facts that make up everyday reality (res)
and the words (verba) and structures that make up literature.  They
question the "pomo" doxa:  that verba magically suffices to radically
change human res.  Of course, there have been other, earlier scholars
that have leveled critiques at "pomo" doxa such as Robert Alter, John
Searle (linguist), John Ellis, and Frederick Crews, to name a few.
Already a decade ago, for example, Crews expressed skepticism at the
ability of the "discourse radicals" (his term) to resist, intervene, and
transform real centers of power.  Moreover, Crews identified pomo's
allergic reaction to positivism as well as its aversion to clear
thinking and writing, declaring it of little service to those oppressed
groups with which it claimed an affiliation.[2] And, there have been
other voices of dissent more squarely situated within the scholarly
Left.  I think here of the sharp bites and barks Terry Eagleton began
making in his essays that began appearing regularly in the late 1990s.
(Now collected and published by Verso as _Figures of Dissent_.)  In
these essays he holds little back, identifying pomo theory as an
"offshoot of science fiction"  (Figures of Dissent 1)  and its so-called
"dialectical thinking" as an anything-goes-eclecticism that, in the name
of social transformation, only ever served up a "restrained, reformist
sort of politics."[3] Eagleton and others identified the dangers of the
apriorism that permeates pomo theory especially when tied to a political
agenda.  When such scholars expressed criticism, however, they were
shrugged off as either a too old-school Left, reactionary, and/or
apolitical.  Today, those who question the pomo doxa seem to be received
with less of a knee-jerk.  I think here of Patrick Colm Hogan, Robert
Storey, Nancy Easterlin, Porter Abbott, Paul Hernadi and Lisa Zunshine,
to name few, who employ the tools learned from narratology and the
knowledge gained from cognitive science and evolutionary biology, for
example, to understand better how literature works for the reader,
writer, and within the world at large.  Others, have approached pomo
theory with the idea of sifting the fine from the coarse in an attempt
to salvage what might be of use.  (I think readily of Satya Mohanty's
"postpositivist realism" and Gayatri Spivak's "strategic essentialism.")
  John McGowan is one such scholar who seeks to question, critique, then
salvage anew pomo theory.  In his book _Democracy's Children:
Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics_, he continues work he
first began over a decade ago in _Postmodernism and Its Critics_ (1991).
  Long skeptical of pomo's formulations--in the latter book he
identifies Derrida's diffrence as a "tragic impasse"--McGowan explores
problems pomo theory raised but did not answer.  Several such questions
include:  what is the role of intellectual work in and outside the
classroom?  Can work in the classroom become a model of social
democracy?  What is the function of literary interpretation?  Can it
transform minds and therefore direct political action?

To answer these necessary and important questions, McGowan attempts to
yoke together a humanist belief in universals--to know those facts that
make our world unjust and that are necessary for us to fight for true
democracy--with a belief that reality is indeterminate and socially
constructed.  As such, he considers the intellectual a "cultural worker"
  who has the power to transform the minds of students through literary
analysis and, therefore, ultimately to transform the psyche of the body
politic.  Yet, the cultural worker must also acknowledge history's
reminder of a material reality of the "people on the bottom" who know
that "they are being screwed" and that "the people on top know they are
screwing them" (p. 90).  According to McGowan, the cultural worker,
then, must realize that "resistance to change isn't psychological, a
matter of false consciousness or subject formation; it is simply the
power of the powerful to maintain arrangements that suit them" (p. 90).
  It is clear that McGowan believes that to level the socioeconomic
playing field by making education and freedom of expression an equal
right for all (his primary goals) requires the locating of real sites of
power to make visible real targets for social transformation.  (At one
point even, he is overtly critical of a Foucault's anarchistic model of
power.)  He is weary of pomo theorists who consider the subject and
world to be discursive constructs and so claim that decoding texts and
symbols will radically alter our world; rather than this leading to
active shaping of society, he sees this as leading to a place of
absolute political apathy.  However, in spite of his pomo skepticism,
McGowan believes that if humans work in and through language, then by
decoding how we work and think within language will lead to new ways of
interpreting and understanding the world and will augment the type of
social transformation that takes place by real people. Yes, he
acknowledges that real people en masse are what bring about social
change, mentioning, for example, the civil rights movement.  However,
because social injustices continue to exist, McGowan believes that a
kind of intellectual cultural work is necessary for the realization of
"full racial equality and harmony" (p. 24).  As such, his criticism of
the irrational aspects of pomo theory--the indeterminacy of the sign
coupled with a belief in a folkish model of talk-therapy--and his
grounding of his own political pursuits in the tangible facts that make
up reality, slide into a theorizing of social change only realized in
the decoding of cultural processes of representation.  Namely, he still
considers verba as being able to alter res.

In his attempt to straddle what is fundamentally a humanist and a pomo
theory position, he locates his own intellectual work within a model of
"pragmatic pluralism."  (This is something akin to the "postliberal
democracy" that he proposed in _Postmodernism and its Critics_.)
Accordingly, as a pragmatic pragmatist, what the intellectual/professor
does in the classroom has consequences in the world beyond its walls
precisely because such classroom discussions articulate, he writes,
"concepts, commitments, and visions that legitimate and/or contest the
way we live now" (p. 3).  Intentionally interdisciplinary and eclectic,
his pragmatic pluralism aims to show how "relationships are contingent
and hence to be understood as the product of human sense-making" (p.
140) and to understand that all human activities make sense through
"performative articulations" (p. 141).  To enact this bi-modal process
is to subvert interpretive paradigms dictated by "elite groups,"
university officials, and gate-keeping theorists.  As such, he aims to
extend "democratic practices into social sites (the classroom, the
workplace) where they are often deemed inappropriate" (p. 6).  The
classroom becomes a space of "dearticulation" par excellence that
enables "negotiations, compromises, arguments, and procedural steps
[that will lead to] collective decisions"  (p. 267).  McGowan's
classroom, then, serves as the egalitarian and collective space where
"differences and interdependencies" (p. 6) are valued and that will help
pave the way for the making of a democratic nation-state.

McGowan's "pragmatic pluralism" appears to be a relativism in another
guise. Namely, it is another way of stating that what we know of the
world and ourselves is contingent on theories that are themselves
contingent on other theories.  This becomes especially apparent when he
identifies "the principle of democratic egalitarianism" (p. 264) as
culturally and historically constituted and not a transcendent truth.
Here, for example, he states, that a "humanist society can make
decisions in the absence of truth"  (p. 264).  His formulation is
tautological.  It suggest that we can transform an empirically
verifiable reality with tools and information that are not verifiable
and whose meaning is relational and contingent. In _Politics of
Interpretation_, Patrick Colm Hogan clarifies, "if I see something as an
orange, this has nothing to do with essences, but means only that I
construe certain experiences in relation to a schematic hierarchy and in
the context of present interests and practices."[4] What Hogan
exemplifies is that there is no question of the presence or absence of
the orange--in the sense of essential presence or absence--but only one
of interest, in this case, in that the orange is perceived as a result
of verifiable biological and cognitive mechanisms.  Our perception of
things is, as Hogan nicely clarifies, "partially accurate and partially
inaccurate understandings of the world.  They are based upon our
previous understandings, including those codified in our linguistic
competence, but they are not confined to these.  And their accuracy is a
matter of the way relevant intentionally discriminated things happen to
be, and not the way supposedly essentially discriminated things are (or
are necessarily)."[5] Namely, the orange, like all things that make up
reality, provides that object that can generate common grounds of
interest and information based on empirically verifiable evidence.

To put it more plainly, for McGowan to even be able to state that
truth/fact is socially constituted relies on the rules of language that
are based on shared understanding of grammar, syntax, and semantics.
Stated otherwise, if there was an absence of truth and empirically
verifiable reality, real social change could never happen; it would mean
that because I was born in Mexico and raised Chicano my brain works
differently to Anglos born and raised in the United States and therefore
my reason--thought, language, algorithmic process--operates differently
to others in the United States.  In other words, if we were all social
constructs, then no communication could be take place between
intellectual and worker and thus no collectivities formed for political
activism.  In such a relationally contingent world, no action would be
possible to realize a shared goal of making a truly democratic
nation-state.  To return to the point made above about the orange, it is
good enough that we perceive and verify things and their effects in the
world.  Claiming that knowledge is relative and that objects and
subjects are socially constituted only muddy our path toward realizing
the true ideals of democracy.

To summarize thus far, in his formulation of a "pragmatic pluralism,
McGowan puts forward arguments that favor the empirical verification of
facts--the pragmatic/humanist element--and simultaneously argues that
"we should consider the symbolics of power" (p. 98)--the pomo/pluralism
element.  This pragmatic pluralism, then, seems only to entangle him
even more in a sticky tautological web.

What can we untangle and salvage, however, from McGowan's formulation?
First, as long as we try to hold together contradictory positions
(empirical and social constructivist), we will always find ourselves
straddling an unbridgable gap--and moving toward a dead end.  Second, it
leads us to ask if we might be able to answer more satisfyingly
questions posed about the role of the critic and theory generally.  We
know from our experiences that reading and interpreting literature can
open eyes to different ways of existing in the world; we know that we
can gain something in the process of reading and interpreting a
novel--our experience of an other--even when we are fully aware of its
fictionality. However, we must ask, is it really possible for our work
as scholars and teachers of literature to influence and single-handedly
transform the values and attitudes of the many millions of people
required for real social transformation?  Can we tell our students that
the work done in the classroom in analyzing, say, Ana Castillo's _So Far
from God_, is a form of political activism?  And, can we really liken
the place of the classroom to a democratic space where legislation and
policy take place?

First, I ask the question, what is our function as teachers of
literature?  Should we shun method, as McGowan suggests in his
formulation of a pragmatic pluralism, to enact egalitarian ideals?  Does
method in the classroom lead us, as McGowan suggests, to a state of
"rigor mortis" (p.  95)?  Just as there is more to the formation of
subjectivity than discourse (power, culture, and otherwise) and more to
social transformation than talk-therapy, there is more to method than
meets the eye.

Method is in the air we breathe.  Every part of our everyday survival as
homo sapiens sapiens requires the teaching, learning, and practicing of
method.  We go to school where methods are employed to teach reading,
writing, and algorithmic skills:  we need to learn rules in and out of
the classroom--words in a certain order and hierarchy within this
order--to communicate; carpenters learn which tools to use and in a
particular order to build houses for shelter; architects and engineers
follow methods to design such structures; pilots learn which instruments
to use and in what order to fly us safely through skies.  Even the most
randomly conceived of cultural forms require method.  I think of
avant-garde art.  Here, the artist must choose from a limited number of
colors that the eye can perceive (determined by cognitive and biological
constraints) and the order by which he or she applies the pigments; with
music, there is the order and constraint of time.  Our ear and brain
cannot absorb Hayden's symphony in one glance, like in visual arts where
one can perceive the whole in an instant, and so notes unfold as a
sequence within time.  And the list could go on _ad infinitum_.  This is
to say, that creation that involves any kind of conception or innovation
has to follow a method.  If we take pause to think about this, we
realize that it is precisely the learning of method, with its
respectively defined perimeters, that advances our knowledge about the
things and activities that fill our world.  (To learn to frame a wall
does not require the learning of the method for flying an airplane, for
example.) Indeed, all the minutiae of our everyday existence entails the
teaching, learning, and practicing of method.

Even if we were to take McGowan's method-as-mortis model as a critique
of scholarly work that fears the interdisciplinary, we run into
problems.  While I am all for learning what we can from other
disciplines--recent advances in cognitive science, linguistics, and
evolutionary biology certainly sheds new light on our understanding of
how literature works--the knowledge in each discipline is produced
precisely because of the use of method.  Each field of inquiry is
productive and even predictive precisely because it limits the number of
directions it pursues.  For example, the physicist follows a certain
method when formulating a hypothesis knowing that for the hypothesis to
lead to any tangible results, it must have limits.  Certainly, these
limits are not fixed for all eternity.  However, whether in the field of
science or in the study of literature, we need to impose limits to what
we intend to investigate or argue and we need method to explore this
"what."  In literature there is no limit to what can be imagined by a
writer, and thus we could discuss and imagine an infinite number of
elements that make up fiction.  Literature--like all phenomena that make
up our culture--is the product of complex human beings and therefore is
as limitless as we are. This does not mean, however, that when writing,
interpreting, and/or teaching literature that we should follow no method
with no limits.  Just as we do need to employ method, we also need to
reduce the number of elements and questions to formulate a hypothesis
that might potentially lead to an explanation of the text at hand.  If
done well, bounded inquiry based on rational method (what Hogan
identifies as an "empirical poetics")  can have great predictive power.
  More precisely, it is the reduction of the number of concepts explored
in, say, narratology that can explain an unlimited number of literary
phenomena:  concept of voice, point of view, etc.  Of course,
narratology is not the only method, but it does have, as we have with
Gerard Genette's work, great explanatory power.

Of course, we should not impose limits that stifle scholarly and
creative exploration.  Rather, we impose limits in order to build on and
revise what we know of literature--and the world generally.  If there is
no method and no limit, then anything goes and whatever we say or argue
has no particular importance.  For example, sociolinguistics (or
"pragmatic linguistics")  eventually ran into a dead end because its
field of inquiry had no boundaries.  Though systematized in the
eighteenth century in the work of Fontanelle, the taxonomy itself as a
way to understand language had no limits.  Language is a very complex
phenomena and immediately associated with millions of human activities
and behavior that are difficult to systematize.  Because the terrain was
too large, the predictive capacity of sociolinguistics turned out to be
worthless. (Chomsky realized that for linguistics to have any predictive
power, it must follow the scientific principle of reduction and
abstraction.  Hence, his formulation of a "universal grammar" is his
reducing the number of linguistic features that appear in all
languages.)  This is to say, if everything goes in the large field of
culture (all that is the product of man's activity) then culture is
everything and therefore as a field of study, it is nothing.  Just as we
must have method (argue, test, and refute) to survive, we must also set
limits to our field of inquiry or else we simply produce _flatus voci_.
  As scholars of literature we can use method to understand better what
the critics make.  What we make are hypothesis based on theories,
analysis, and arguments that can be furthered by reaching out to other
fields that use the same empirical method to arrive at their own
conclusions. As teachers of literature, we need to provide students with
the methods for them to sort seed from the pulp.  Teaching students that
eclecticism is better than rigorous method, or that reduction is to
destructively essentialize, or that subjects and the world are
discursively constructed, move us away from the means by which we can
build, verify, refute, and revise our understanding of how literature wor=
ks.

Method is hardly that path, then, that leads to rigor mortis.  Indeed,
method (with its disciplinary limits and tools to test hypotheses)
allows us to formulate within specified boundaries and limits a number
of elements that make up a teachable system that can be passed on as a
tool for a next generation of scholars to learn, revise, and build upon
anew. Without limits to literary exploration, we can conjecture
limitlessly because all is contingent and arbitrary.  As literary
scholars we should be affirming the place of method in opening up the
possibility for exploratory advancement.  Without method we have
limitlessness and thus ultimately, as Porter Abbott clearly states, "a
limitation caused by limitlessness."[6]

As I have already suggested, without a clear understanding of how
knowledge is arrived at, any type of statement can be made:  there is no
hors text, or that there is only the color red.  With a similar
declarative bravado, McGowan proposes that the classroom is or should be
a democratic space; teaching in the classroom should foster democratic
ideals of equality, freedom of speech, press, and tolerance for all
taste and opinion.  For McGowan, the classroom is that last frontier
where tolerance for "differences and interdependencies (of various
kinds)" (6)  can flourish in an otherwise totalitarian-like university
setting and society generally.  In this schema, to teach without method
and to diffuse authority is to further the goals of democracy.  The goal
becomes not to teach methods for analyzing literature, but for the
teacher to awaken "new identities" in the "joining of desire to ideals,
of identities with public, cultural form" (72-73).  If authority is
everywhere, then it is nowhere.  There must be an identifiable center of
authority in the classroom that provides useful limits and rules as
required by its respective disciplinary methodological contours in order
for students to learn and become independent thinkers.  The teacher has
trained for a certain amount of time (sometimes years and years) and has
acquired a knowledge of things that the students cannot and do not have
simply because they have not been able to devote as much time and energy
as the teacher.

What does this mean?  It means that the teacher has a series of tasks
and has to be qualified to introduce concepts and categories and tools
to deal with the verifiable elements that constitute his or her
particular discipline.  And, to suggest that power in the classroom is
everywhere follows a belief that power is everywhere.  This is
necessary, of course, if one believes that we can enact resistance and
political intervention through language and cultural phenomena.
However, not only does it participate in a formulation of power that
dislocates and permanently erases it from real sites--the State
apparatus of the real ruling class and the owners of the means of
production that assert "real" power through executive, legislative and
judicial institutions--but it dangerously leads to the type of
complacency that McGowan himself objects to:  academics comfortably
situated in their corner of the world destabilizing the symbolic while
real oppression and exploitation of real people continues. So, it is not
in the teaching of non-method, but the teaching of method that provides
the clear-sighted thinking necessary to see things as they are outside
the classroom where real political activism takes place.  If we define
democracy as the way English is taught in the classroom, as McGowan
proposes, we are making nonsense of the very concept.  As he correctly
observes, the classroom can be a vital place for learning and sharing of
ideas.  However, democracy remains that which the people wish to turn
into law and policy, and not that of studying literature in the
classroom.  Democracy, in the strict sense of the term, is that stated
in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights: the establishment
by the people of the general rules that will apply to all the people.
In point of fact, the classroom should not be a democracy.  Just as a
pilot does not submit to his or her passengers a vote as to how to land
an airplane, nor should the teacher submit to his or her students how
and what will be taught.  Both spaces are absolutely totalitarian in
this sense:  neither teacher nor pilot should submit to vote any
decision he or she makes.  Indeed, applying McGowan's so-identified
democratic approach to teaching--submitting to vote whether students
read the Yellow Pages instead of Julio Cortzar's _Hopscotch_, for
example, or to study narratology instead of a book on how to improve
your tennis swing--would never lead to our further understanding of how
literature works.  This still leaves us the question that McGowan aptly
poses:  "how do texts shape or influence the values, attitudes, and
actions of the selves who read them" (p. 67)?  When we pick up, say,
John Rechy's _City of Night_, and have stepped into the shoes of his
bi-racial, queer protagonist's experiences of U.S. demimondes, has
anything more than our imagination been transformed?  When we step back
into our reality, has the experience of this fictional world transformed
us or even transformed our reality? Common sense already suggests that
reality will not have been transformed. But, if literature has the power
to open our eyes to other ways of being, does it not then have the power
to change the way we think and therefore act in the world.  As such,
does it not indirectly have the power to transform reality?  Certainly,
literature can be a resource for us to better understand the world.  (Of
course it is more then this, otherwise we could read essays or other
more straightforward forms of communicating ideas.)  And like any field
of knowledge that sheds light on human activity and the world we inhabit
(physics, for example, helps us understand how gravity works), it has
the potential to change our attitudes toward this world.  However, to
transform our reality requires human action--and this in the hundred of
millions.  Likewise, when we study or teach literature, this does not
change the development or non-development of, say, capitalism.  As
history proves, regardless of whether or not we study and teach
literature, capitalism developed; the merchants that transformed society
into a capitalist marketplace did not do so by knowing literature any
better.

So why do we teach literature if it is not, as McGowan proposes, to
further our aims of creating a true democracy?  We study literature to
discover, for example, how authors like Ana Castillo, John Rechy, or
Arturo Islas (some of my favorites) use specific narrative tools to
engage their readers' imagination.  We study literature to know better
how those black marks on the page can create images and sounds in the
mind of the reader.  We study how literature's formal features and
organization become meaningful in a serious, playful, ironic, or tense
manner.  We study literature to understand better how the reader
suspends disbelief.  We study literature to understand better why we
feel the pleasure and pain of a character while simultaneously aware of
its ontological status as fiction.  We study literature to explore how a
novel like _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ uses point of view and
temporal disjunction to engage in new and novel ways how we remember.
We study literature to understand better how the universal human
capacity of storytelling might shed light on our capacity to tell the
difference between deception and truth, hostility and love, in our
everyday social encounters.  We study the verifiable elements (point of
view, style, temporality, genre, mood, for example) of literature to
understand better how writers use such tools to engage their readers.

The study of literature also requires the sharing and explaining of our
discoveries.  To explain something is to understand how it works, its
existence.  And, all explanation, of course, implies interpretation.  I
cannot explain how to use a hammer if I cannot communicate what the
hammer is and does.  Understanding is interpreting; they are
complementary.  So, we interpret to understand and to pass along a
verifiable method that can be built upon and revised to further the
knowledge of our discipline.  As scholars and teachers of literature,
then, our business is the business of literature.  This does not mean
that we should be ignorant of politics.  However, our job in the
classroom is not that of political activism--building the party and so
on--but to attend to our business as scholars of literature.  Neither
are we in business of psychology, sociology, cognitive science,
linguistics, and so on.  So, while it is important for us to know the
research in the field of cognitive psychology or, say, linguistics, it
is with the aim of better understanding how literature works.  For
example, we can posit the not completely unfounded hypothesis that
poetry manifested itself before the novel because, as deduced by
cognitive research on brain development, rhythm has a mnemonic function.
  Such research from psychology labs and or neuroscience research gives
us useful information in that it allows us, in this case, to better
understand our different engagement with prose and poetry.  And, if we
can understand better how language functions by turning to recent
research in linguistics--proving that there is no direct link between
language and thought--then we can understand how art might stimulate
those thought processes that take place pre-linguistically.  This might
lead to a further understanding of how images form in our mind that are
non-linguistic after reading words on a page.  And, recent advances in
evolutionary psychology can shed light on whether the concept of the
"implied author" is valid or not.  If it is valid (empirically
verifiable), it will help us understand how it is produced in the mind
of reader and the writer.  It might also help us understand better how a
few descriptive details in a given passage can produce a full
holographic in my mind; and, how the holographic effect is achieved
differently in realism and the fantastic, magical realism and minimalism.

At the end, I return to the point made at the beginning of this essay:
to formulate a theory whereby verba magically transforms res, is to
replace "real" social and political programs based on empirical fact and
universal need for civil rights in this world with esoteric speculation.
  Therefore it is also our job as teachers not to regard the classroom
and/or the interpretation of literature as the ersatz means of
"empowerment" and "liberation" in lieu of the actual mobilization of an
autonomously organized youth and labor force.  Perhaps the best way to
further the goal of realizing a true democracy is not to confuse the
classroom with the democratic politics that is shaped through the work
of millions of people. Perhaps, the best way for us to further
democratic goals is encourage the learning of methods that can verify
facts to build our understanding not just of literature but of the world
we inhabit.  In this spirit, perhaps our role is to encourage our
students to turn to other fields of inquiry, not to become specialists
in those fields, but to see how such research might help us better
understand how homo sapien sapien functions universally.  This is the
method that promises to shed light on one of our many activities--our
making of and engagement with literature.


Notes

[1].  Emily Eakin, "The Latest Theory Is that Theory Doesn't Matter,"
_New York Times_ (April 19, 2003), p. 9.

[2].  Frederick Crews, _After Poststructuralism:  Interdisciplinarity and
Literary Theory_, eds Nancy Easterlin and Barbar Riebling (Evanson:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. vii-x.

[3].  Terry Eagleton, _Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish,
Spivak, Zizek and Others_ (New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 1, 160, 165.

[4].  Patrick Colm Hogan, _The Politics of Intepretation: Ideology,
Professionalism, and the Study of Literature_ (New York: Oxford Universit=
y
Press, 1990), p. 61.

[5]. Ibid.

[6]. Porter H. Abbott, "Humanists, Scientists, and the Cultural Surplus,"
_SubStance_ 30, nos. 1 & 2 (2001): p. 204.


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Frederick Luis Aldama is Associate Professor at the University of
Colorado, Boulder.  He teaches U.S. Latino and British postcolonial
literature and film.  He is the author of several books, including
"Postethnic Narrative Criticism", "Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical
Biography of Arturo Islas", and  "Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works."
He has published a number of articles that explore a variety of topics
such as music, film, and photography as well as authors such as Charles
Dickens, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Ana Castillo, and Richard
Rodriguez.  He serves on several editorial boards for journals such as
Journal of Narrative Technique, Aztl=E1n, English Language Notes, and
World Literature Today.  He is currently finishing the book, "Unraveling
Postcolonial Narrative and the World Literary Imagination", that brings
together cognitive science and narratology in the study of authors such
as Moshin Hamid, Fernando del Paso, Mario Vargas Llosa, Luis Rodriquez,
and Amitav Ghosh.

Andrew McMichael
H-Amstdy Book Reviews